


By My Side

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [178]
Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, Love, M/M, Post-Avengers: Infinity War Part 1 (Movie), Reunions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-24
Updated: 2018-10-24
Packaged: 2019-08-06 21:48:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16395710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: “You’re alive.”Two words, hardly spoken. Almost no sound in them at all.





	By My Side

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: Reconciliation. Prompt from this [generator](http://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

“You’re alive.”

Two words, hardly spoken. Almost no sound in them at all.

He tries again. “You’re alive.”

Dark hair in the shadows, a glint of blue, ice-bourne light. “So it would seem, yes.”

He can’t bring himself to move. He’s afraid to. Afraid that if he shifts the air, stirs the world around them in any way, the figure just out of sight will vanish and leave him alone again in the night. So he says:

“Come here, brother.”

A chuckle, a soft sound he’d almost forgotten. Has it really been that long?

“Where is here, darling? Where is it you wish me to be?”

There’s a bubble of anger within him, a tremor of an ancient sort of rage, but there’s no true fire behind it; dulled as it is, dampened, by something far more fundamental, an ache lightened after all these years by hope.

“Here,” he says, smoothing his hand across the coverlet. “By my side.”

The shadows are still for a moment, as if the night itself, the great moons beyond, is holding its breath. And then, oh then, there is a tremor in the blackness, like a curtain stirred by the wind, and the unmistakable sound of footsteps, careful ones; of first one boot and then the other treading on the worn, warm stone.

“Can it be so?” the voice says as it moves, drifting ever closer to the weak glow of the candle by the bed. “Have you grown sentimental in your old age, my king?”

His eyes are wet. He can feel it. His cheeks now, too; his beard quick with old tears he’d never let himself shed.

“You have.” The words closer now, as is the body that bears them, the long-beloved face. “Oh, my dear. I never thought I’d live to see the day.”

It’s a tease, one that was once familiar, thrown so often as a jibe in bed or in battle that the meaning of the words themselves had been lost. But now, after all that’s been lost, all the years of loneliness and ill-temperament, of pain and poor choices, of the sort of cold inside in his heart that even the kindest hearth could not touch, they cut into him deep like a blade.

“You’re alive,” he whispers. “Are you? Or is this some sort of cruel dream?”

Dark hair in the candlelight, a glint of blue, melted ice. “It’s no dream. See? Here.” A slim hand on his, pressing his palm into the coverlet. “I am of substance. Are you sure it’s not you who is a ghost?”

His heart pounds, his blood sings; every part of him cries out _he is here_ and yet--and yet he cannot forget the many times he’s dreamed of this moment, the hours he’s passed in a haint’s embrace in the night only to awaken and find himself once more, forever, alone.

The hand on his tightens. “Thor, it’s me. Truly.”

His own voice, rusty now. Rough with the weight of the years. “You’ll forgive me if I find it difficult to trust.”

A stroke of a thumb over his wrist. “Believe it or not, I can understand why. There were times I’d thought I’d found you--that I was sure of it--and when I realized I had not, I...those were very dark days, indeed.”

He wants to touch. The line of that jaw, the silken tumble of hair, they cry out for it, don’t they? Demand it. But fear has stilled his hand; fear and the most terrible need he’s ever known--gods, he’s ached for this moment, for this man, for so long, that his heart itself became a bruise, that now, with everything he wants within reach, he can’t bring himself to reach out and clutch.

“Darling,” Loki says, gentle and terrified. “Oh, my darling, are you really so afraid?”

The bed shifts, sinks for a brief moment under the unfamiliar added weight, and then Loki is speared across his lap, knees pressed to his hips where they still lie wound in the sheets. They are chest to chest, face to face, and his brother is heaving, his breath coming in great, anxious gasps as he scrabbles at the headboard behind Thor’s back.

“Stop looking at me like that! Stop looking at me at all, you damned fool, and put your hands on me. What better proof could you need?”

The smell of him is different; ozone mixed with starstuff and sage, but beneath it lies the chilled scent of Asgard’s lakes, of sun and wheat and of their mother’s garden, cloves and roses crushed beneath.

“Oh,” Loki says, low in his chest, the blood in his throat aflutter. “Oh, please.”

His face is pressed to Loki’s neck, his nose tracing the soft skin there, thin. Thin and warm, always, even when the rest of Loki’s body was cold: in the mornings when they’d kicked off the covers as they slept, or on those days when they made love in the sunshine, their fervor crushing the grass, and fell asleep until the moon painted their flesh with silver fingers, with breezes that smelled of the night.

His arms are around Loki’s waist now, greedy, and Loki’s hands are in his hair, tugging helplessly at the tangles, at the thin lines of his mourning plaits.

They’re not kissing. They should be.

“If I kiss you,” he says against the pale turn of Loki’s throat, “if I kiss you and you disappear, be it now or in an hour, I’ll never forgive you. If I kiss you now, Loki, you must swear to me that you’ll stay.”

Loki shudders, his nails goring the bare flesh of Thor’s back. “If you knew what it’s taken for me to come to you, brother, you would not need to ask.”

“I don’t give a damn. Swear.”

A groan, a hollow sound from the depths. “If you kiss me, my darling,” Loki says, the words shaking in the darkness, “I swear to you I will not stray.”

There is silver in his beard now, streaks of comet’s dust in his hair, but he tears away Loki’s leathers--a rich green turned through with black--with the same vigor, the same ease he did when they were young, when the worlds were; when their greatest fear was only discovery, not death. Never death. And even that, it seems, has ever been enough to keep them apart.

“Thor,” Loki breathes, his nipples licked to stiff peaks, his neck abloom in bitten roses. “Brother, please.” On his back now, staring up at Thor wild, his curls a black stain on white sheets. “Kiss me.”

“No,” Thor says, leaning their foreheads together. “Not yet.”

Loki spreads his thighs when Thor strokes his hip, parts them and pants when Thor drags his mouth over his breastbone and down and down to where his brother’s affections are most plainly expressed.

“Sweet,” he murmurs, turning his tongue across the head. “So pretty, Loki. So sweet.”

Once, Loki would have sworn at him for this, sworn and thrown things about the room with a bitten-off spell until he got what he wanted: his cock shoved deep in Thor’s mouth. But now, he’s still, his body carved up by tiny tremors, his lips stuttering, his hands like fragile birds as Thor tastes him, slow, lingering traces of tongue and fingertips.

“I would have you,” he says after a time, petting at the soft dark of Loki’s hole. “May I?”

Hands batter at his head; a wordless, needy cry pounds his ears.

_Please_ , they say. _Please._

He clutches his brother’s knees and folds them up, leans his face where his fingers have been, and oh, how Loki cries out for him, a shatter of sounds so much like stained glass. How he opens and closes around the tip of Thor’s tongue, every muscle, just like that one, trembling, quaking, aching, and when he rears up at last to ease in his cock, Loki moans, a shout shaped like Thor’s name. And then:

“Kiss me,” Loki pleads, their bodies sealed together, his face on the pillow a red, fevered slash. “Damn you, darling, I’m begging you. Kiss--”

And then he does because he can no longer hold back and the sound Loki makes shakes the stone walls, the floor, the very foundation of this quiet, lonely place. There is no gentleness to it, no caution; only the clash of teeth and the fierce sink of their mouths together, their tongues. It’s like the first time they kissed, Thor thinks in a fever, heady and stupid in the far corner of the horse yard. They’d been for a ride out to the soft hills of the country; had eaten lunch by a lake and played like little boys in the cool snake of a stream. Except they were little no longer and when they’d wrestled in the warm water, shouting with each happy splash, they had both felt it: a spark, one that lit in every place they touched one another; on shoulders, on legs, on wrists.

Why they hadn’t simply kissed then, far away from the castle gates, he couldn’t remember; ah, the illogic of youth. But when they’d returned home safe and seen to their horses, dripping now with dust and the smell of green grass and sweat, somehow they’d crowded into a quiet stall and found each other’s mouths at last; kissed each other like they were starving, as if succor could only be found in the other, as if they might never have the chance to do so again.

So was it now, centuries later, a long stretch of lifetimes away.

“My love,” Loki whispers in those moments between. “My brother, my darling. Kiss me again.” 

There is heat between their bellies soon, wet, and in the heady stretch between Loki’s thighs, but they cling to each other still, lips relearning each other, reveling, fingers intertwined.

“If I ask you where you’ve been,” he says against Loki’s cheek, “would you tell me?”

“Yes.” A kiss on his jaw. “And if I ask you how long you’ve been alone here in this godsforsaken place, would you answer me true?” 

“I would.”

A tangle of nails in his hair, a swift, sharp tug up and back, and they’re eye to eye, blue into blue staring back.

“Perhaps,” Loki says, “we would be better served for once by living in the present, rather than lingering too long in the past.”

He smiles, sees its twin appear on his brother’s face. “We’re here now and that’s enough. Is that it?”

Loki scratches at his hip, curls a palm around the curve of his ass, and tugs them together forever, tight. “Truth be told, Thor: I like the sound of that.”

And so it was for as long as the moons outside lived, so long as the sun burned to rise and set as each dawn faded to dusk; here they remained, happy at last, side by side.

 


End file.
